Wednesday, March 25, 2009

It is so hard for me to do one thingMore than a handful of timesWhen there are so many things to doSo very many types of things and actions and sounds I can make, ways to speak, books to draw in...It's hard to excuse repeating.

It is clear to me that this is a fault as much as it is a strength.

After 17 hours of traveling west through the night, the sun rose in my rearview mirror for the first time in my life, passing through Santa Claus, Indiana. I love the first times of my life.

Thursday, March 19, 2009

The distance between the soles of her shoesand the cracked asphalt is so small really thateven ants detour around her flip-flops,seeing no hope of continuingforward in their original direction.

So no one can tell, but she is floating.And the days are flying bywhile she laughs them off as temporal thingsWith a linger aftertaste of saltand ink.

For all of the times she has stood,black-mouthed in front of a press and laughingFor late night faulterings that deposit ink or paint into the mouthWhen two hands weren't enough to hold everythingand the wrong end of the brush was held between the teeth.

For all of those times, the taste was stronger today, As she locked her studio door and her eyes lingeredover her own clean handsBusy with other things, and the worse for it.

--

I wrote this in 2006, as my time as a professional art student was coming to an end, and I remember so clearly the fear that I was about to end my life as an artist out of necessity: entering the real world, having bills to pay and no time to be what i pretended during college years I could be.

As I clean and pack up my workspace at my art center job and prepare to travel to St. Louis to sell the things I make to people, making a living at being a creative person and an artist, I am so amazed and thankful.

I posted this obnoxiously long comment on Michael's facebook when he posted this article, and then realized I'd like to see what other people think so I am posting it here, too, with some added stuff at the end:

Here's what I think: The lady who wrote this article is a mom, and the moms in our life got on Facebook with a different understanding of what it's purpose was. When I first started on Facebook, the only people I was friends with on it were friends from my current life, college. It was an umbrella communication tool. Back then it was like, once every couple of months someone you remembered from somewhere else would friend you, and it was a huge surprise and a little weird.

Once my mom's generation got on it, they had to understand it in the context of their life, a much less digital existence, and so the shape it took was not social networking, but connecting with the past. I sort of think it probably had a lot to do with the constant pop-up ads for years that everyone got from classmates.com, telling you to reconnect with people you went to high school with. That was way more palatable to someone who didn't grow up on AIM chat.

So while I don't disagree that Facebook may change the way people reminisce, I also think that it's not necessary to be lonely to grow, and it's not necessarily healthy reinforce the old idea that you need to keep growing and changing into different versions of yourself while no one is watching...Wouldn't it actually be refreshing if we just evolved in front of each other and learned to understand each other as self-improving humans? Or no?

I just feel like every generation we fall into this same trap of looking at the younger generation as "doing it wrong" or messing up growing up, or whatever. All I know is, I'm in the group they are talking about but I am happy, thoughtful, and feel like I'm doing it right. Even updated my Facebook status with mangled syntax such as "Jackie is indie craft show."